Converting to renewable energy sources will do nothing to stop the environmental destruction caused by mining, logging, and other industrial processes, nor will it address increasing wealth inequality. If activists are serious about saving the planet need to recognize the corporate-led economy as the root problem to be overcome.

[Editor's note: we at GEO wish to extend our deepest condolences to the people of Ecuador who recently experienced a devastating earthquake that claimed the lives of hundreds of people. The following article from our archives (originally published in 2004) recounts the beginnings of the Kallari Cooperative, a co-op composed of Kichwa farmers and artisans in the Ecuadorian Amazon. From their start as a small handcraft cooperative, as detailed by Fernandes below, Kallari has grown into a successful bean-to-bar chocol

The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to participate in decisions about that resource’s use.

[Editor's note: This article introduces an exciting new development at GEO — "Movement Pages". These are resource pages devoted to movements related to our own, that will be curated by activists from those areas. We hope that this will help stimulate cross-pollination of ideas and practices between our groups, and help to "de-silo" people who are working on different, but related, issues.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is organized by several entities and social movements from many countries “that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to [the] domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth” in a self-managed, decentralized and networked way.

Today, man is still, or more than ever, man's enemy, not only because he continues as much as ever to give himself over to massacres of his fellow kind, but also because he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting: the environment.Cornelius Castoriadis 1

“People called commons those parts of the environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of community respect. People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”

This is how I concluded my blog last week on what seems to be the promise of Piketty’s work:

It seems to me that some heavyweight mainstream economic thinking is emerging that might be very supportive co-operative/solidarity and other movements for alternative economics. But that still leaves us with the overarching problem of how do we generate the power to move our movements more dynamically.